Re: LLVM and Ada

[Bojan Bozovic <bozovic.bojan@gmail.com>]

On Sunday, March 25, 2018 at 12:29:48 PM UTC+2, Bojan Bozovic wrote:
> On Friday, March 23, 2018 at 5:38:03 PM UTC+1, Shark8 wrote:
> > On Friday, March 23, 2018 at 8:38:11 AM UTC-6, Dan'l Miller wrote:
> > > 
> > > Oh, and why isn't Ada viewed as one of the Things in the “LLVM All the Things” mantra?  Someone needs to hook the Ada railcar up to that locomotive before it completely leaves the train-station.
> > 
> > Insofar as Byron is concerned:
> > (a) I intend for the backend to be completely modularizable, and therefore am not married to any particular code-generator.
> > (b) Nobody who wanted LLVM codegen has contributed to the code-base.
> 
> Look at Coco/R compiler compiler http://ssw.jku.at/Coco/ there is Ada version as well, which is under GPL but makes syntax and semantic checker, and could be even compiled with AdaCore GNAT and proved with SPARK, and still produce non-GPL compiler. Consider using already existing runtime from FSF GNAT modified for your compiler, and using LLVM optimizers. Ideally aim for something like WATCOM/OpenWATCOM C/C++ where you have few host OS platforms but many libraries for run-time and code generators instead using GCC way of building cross-compiler. Making Byron compiler will be many many man-years work, so using existing tools will make you actually make progress and eventually finish it. My $0.02 useful or not.

Maybe it would be better to use permissively licensed compiler, FSF GNAT, instead. I'm really not sure what will be linked to Coco/R generated compiler, so if there's GPL stuff there would be a problem. Please excuse me for this duplicate message, I'm trying to be helpful even though I don't know much.